With the new edition around, I decided to finall do a project I've already considered since Admirality: A conversion of the ships found in FreeSpace 2, one of my favorite space combat PC games.

Story

FreeSpace 2 takes place in the 24th century, 32 years after the Great War, during which mankind and the alien Vasudans had to end their territorial war to fend off the Shivans, a mysterious invader with superior technology. The newly-formed alliance managed to defeat the aggressor, but not before the Shivans destroyed the Vasudan homeworld and forced the humans do destroy the only known hyperspace route to the Sol system.

The following decades have been peaceful for the Galactic Terran-Vasudan Aliance, rebel factions from both sides notwithstanding. Though it seemed that an old "friend" has come back...

Technology

The setting is quite primitive compared to others. Many capital ship weapons don't have a whole lot of range, and those that do tend to have a slow rate of fire. On the other hand everyone's very keen on turrent mounts, leading to good coverage.

The major drawback of the setting is that although energy shields are standard for fighters, they simply don't scale up effectively enough to be useful for capital ships. The only ship to ever have shields was the Lucifer, the Shivan flagship of the Great War, and that thing was more of a plot device because the shields made it invulnerable outside of hyperspace.

Fighters on the other hand are quite advanced. All of them are capable of entering hyperspace, and many missions are carried out at least a sector away from their carrier ship.

Fighter Types

FS2 is quite big on fighters, seeing how it's a game about piloting one. I might even make another conversion in the macro-scale.

Anyhow, most fighters in the game easily translate to one of the fighter variants, with the standard fighter generally labeled as a "Space Superiority Fighter".Most "bombers" in the game however are closer to a Heavy Fighter, as they can take a lot more damage than any other type of fighter, and sometimes even come with mini-turrets to fend off fellow fighters.

A Note on Weapons

I had to condense some capital weapons into one type, as they didn't really end up looking too different when converting. I also used a different naming schemes, as none of the capital weapons have an in-universe name and use stuff like "Very Big Green Beam" in the game files.

Weapons of note are the Slashing Beam, which sweep over their target in a wide arc (with the side-effect of making it hard to predict how much damage the beam will actually do), and the Missiles, a catch-all term for various types of capital missiles. They are mainly used to intercept fighters, using a combination of small shockwaves and cluster missiles to catch their target.

A Note on Ships

As noted above, ships in this setting don't have Shields, and they don't qualify for Screens because weapons and other subystems are quite exposed on the hull. I gave them Ionized Hulls as a compensation. I haven't settled on Technology Levels, but pretty much all ships I've done easily qualify for a -2 in weapon systems.

FreeSpace sports a few ship types which are either one-of-a-kind or only encountered in special situations. I'll safe them for a later post.

Terran Ships

These are your typical humans in space. Their ships are quite boxy, and they're very fond of Greek names and the color blue.

You may want to add Mdl to the beam weapons- the reason that FS ships don't carry shields is because beam weapons just cut right through them- and also because non-bomber fighters can't destroy larger capital ships anyways.

Decided to update the ships with Mdl beam weapons, which incidentally almost filled up all SUs of certain ships. I like it if things fall into place like this.

Next up are the Vasudans. They're hairless humanoids with very pronounced hip bones. They originally come from a desert planet and have a very complex, caste-based society that reminded the Terrans of Ancient Egypt, so much so that all the Terran code names for Vasudan vessels come from Egyptian mythology. The Vasudans just rolled with it after doing their own research on Ancient Egypt.

Vasudans have a rather small selection of ships, but they are aesthetically pleasing. They're also big into yellow and sand colors.

And finally the Shivans. They are the most elusive of the three races, with unkown motives and a pronounced lack of interest in communicating with anyone. They have apparently been around for thousands of years and seem to have access to vast resources (their first invasion fleet from the first game that almost wiped out the other two factions was apparently just a scouting party; the next invasion is worse).Their actual physiology is also up for debate, though seeing how a human boarding party in the first war ran into a three-legged thing that shot laser beams from its eye, they appear to have a thing for cybernetics and/or power armor.

Their ship's weaponry is very similar to the other factions', with some slightly different weapons and a lack of slashing beams. They're also fond of missiles.

Due to their ships being very spiky with a black and red color scheme, they have been given rather demonic code names.